New York City Ballet, Enlivened by the New

New York City Ballet’s four-week fall season — just a few years old — brought multiple signs of self-renewal. The repertory ranged from 10 varied Balanchine ballets to five world premieres, each rewarding. The ballerina Jennie Somogyi, the company’s longest-serving dancer, gave her farewell performance on Oct. 11; a week later, the company ended its season with a clutch of debut performances including two particularly fine ones in Balanchine roles (the Concerto section of “Episodes” and the Sanguinic variation of “The Four Temperaments”) in which Ms. Somogyi had set standards.

There were disappointments: Despite Ms. Somogyi, and though successive performances improved, the revival of “Liebeslieder Walzer” reached fewer heights than this ballet can attain. And there were enduring problems: The horrid designs for the company’s “Swan Lake” do not improve with revival, and the idea of making the fall gala a fashion event brings its share of drawbacks.

One of the programs this season was “Balanchine Black and White.” Might the company not learn from this and ask its young choreographers to create ballets in minimal costumes, rather than having to cope with the intrusions of haute couture?

In the event, four choreographers in their 20s — Robert Binet (“The Blue of Distance”), Justin Peck (“New Blood”), Troy Schumacher (“Common Ground”) and Myles Thatcher (“Polaris”) — conferred importance on this season; so did Kim Brandstrup, 58, who introduced a longer work (“Jeux”). (Mr. Brandstrup, Mr. Binet and Mr. Thatcher were new to City Ballet.) Five good premieres by five choreographers, each showing skill and imagination: When did any company last manage such a trick? Though I don’t mean to overpraise any of these pieces, I’m keen to see more work by all five men.

And the four young ones all showed what we can call 21st-century values in choreography, in which women support men as well as vice versa, and same-sex couples are par for the course. (Actually, this became established in modern dance in the 1980s. Ballet has been slow to catch up.) These ballets didn’t make their sexual points aggressively; the climate onstage was unforced and refreshing.

These new works proved good to rewatch, too. The dancers performed them with warmth and revealed new facets to each. On Saturday, the performance of Mr. Peck’s “New Blood” was so exhilarating that it vanquished my problems about the work’s display of compositional virtuosity: the main subject became the dancers challenging themselves and each other. I retain other reservations, though, especially about its makeup and the shtick of its repeated cardiac arrest gesture. The whole thing is a game in which I don’t believe, yet it’s both fun and compelling.

Mr. Binet’s choreographic voice in “The Blue of Distance” is the strangest and most remarkably poetic among the premieres. He interrupts steps and phrases at peculiar moments (sometimes catching the stress of a transition or lift); creates inscrutable patterns and echoes and motifs (I love the cruciform shapes the dancers make, with palms facing ahead); and keeps changing directions. This is choreography that would surely be equally rewarding to watch from the sides or behind. The connections it makes to its Ravel scores, “Oiseaux tristes” and “Une barque sur l’océan” (both from “Miroirs”), are fascinating, not least in the interstices between dancers; space here mirrors sound.

The sculptural groupings of Mr. Thatcher’s “Polaris” alone show signs of an important choreographic voice, but he combines this with constant (musically attentive) structural change and an appealing ambiguity in the main role. We can see that Tiler Peck is the outsider figure, but what is she looking at? Not always the others by any means; often her focus seems to be on an unseen mirror image of herself. Mr. Thatcher doesn’t resolve this sufficiently nor does he develop the early connection he makes between Ms. Peck’s role and the piano (his music is the Allegramente movement of William Walton’s Piano Quartet in D minor).

Since I’ve praised Mr. Schumacher’s “Common Ground” twice in these pages, I will just say it would be twice as agreeable if the loose strands hanging from the costumes’ sleeves were removed. The reservations I had about Mr. Brandstrup’s “Jeux” on a first viewing don’t vanish, but it, like everything on this program of premieres, is a real piece. I note with pleasure that all these new pieces return to repertory in February except “New Blood,” which will be replaced by Mr. Peck’s next work.

The highlight of the company’s good American-music quintuple bill was Mr. Peck’s “Rodeo.” This, so far, is the ballet of the year, and it gets better at each viewing. Isn’t it time we had an all-Peck program? It would extend both us and him.

Dancers at each level of the company made important advances during the season. At corps level, I single out Harrison Ball, Joseph Gordon (especially), Claire Kretzschmar and Alexa Maxwell, but repertory kept drawing the eye to others. Witness “New Blood,” in which the seasoned virtuoso Andrew Veyette and the corps dancer Daniel Applebaum set each other gleaming challenges in a brief duet that proved just one of this season’s many pleasures. Brittany Pollack, Russell Janzen, Ashly Isaacs (Ms. Somogyi’s admirable successor in “Episodes”) and Taylor Stanley are the soloists to be watched with keenest hope; again, they are not alone.

Among the principals, Tiler Peck rose nobly and eagerly to challenge after challenge. Her first Sanguinic in the season’s closing “Temperaments” was breathtaking; even if we knew she’d have the speed and precision, who knew she’d make so much of the role’s huge off-balance stretches facing one way and then another? The high-voltage luster she and Mr. Veyette brought to the “Tema con Variazioni” finale of Balanchine’s “Tschaikovsky Suite No. 3” did the heart good.

Yes, there remain causes for concern. It was fair to hope for more from the “Liebeslieder” revival, and the casting for Balanchine’s “Monumentum pro Gesualdo” and “Movements for Piano and Orchestra” made that bold pair of modernist works merely insipid. But I look at the nine Balanchine ballets listed for the opening week of the company’s January-February season, “Liebeslieder” among them, and count the weeks impatiently.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section C, Page 5 of the New York edition with the headline: A Fall Season Enlivened by the New . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe